When I think of my relationship with my own earthly father, I think back to a speech that I made when he turned 60. I publicly thanked him for his caring attitude to myself, my brother and others as we had grown up. I illustrated this by talking about how he had always repaired my bike whenever I had a flat tyre. My mum would witness me wheeling home the bike, from the kitchen window and sigh. She would explain how busy my Dad was and that I would have to wait a while before he could get around to fixing it. I never took her too seriously; the bike was usually fixed by the next morning. I repeated all this in my speech. My Dad's response was to thank me and then to say that were a lot of other (less favourable) things that I could have said. He was, of course, right. This is true for any earthly father. It is an awesome responsibility being a father and so often we get it wrong with our children. I know that I have and continue to do so. I am so very blessed to have a kind and forgiving son. But if I live to be sixty, I don't want to be there when he gives a speech about me.
More to the point, the way that our children come to view God may be based on the way that they see their parents. My parents must have done and OK job as I am able to see God as a loving father. Sadly many people reject God as they are simply projecting their own parents' attributes on to him. Children without loving earthly fathers rarely find it easy to respond well to a loving heavenly father at first. All of us, whether parents or not, need to be good representatives of our heavenly father to the young people that we come into contact with.
For prayer… Thank God for the people that you have a parental role with. There may be more than you think. Ask God to make you a good, living reflection of what he is like for those people.
John Martin-Jones
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